


Bare God, then We'll Talk

by MorbidOptimist



Series: Permutational Laments [1]
Category: Silent Hill (Video Game Series), Teen Titans - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Body Horror, Cult of Blood, Cult of Scath, Cults, Gen, Horror, Trigon's Cult
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-08-04 15:49:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16349600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorbidOptimist/pseuds/MorbidOptimist
Summary: Tara Markov was not expecting her mentor to cast her adrift in a school of miscreant children.The HIVE is hiding something. Something big.Terra is used to hiding things; finding answers, however, will not be such a simple a task.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amorea (executivecodearbitration)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/executivecodearbitration/gifts).



> A Halloween present inspired by my love of the Silent Hill franchise, despite being technically unfamiliar with most of the titles. 
> 
> This fic is loosely inspired by the Silent Hill games, and draws from the backstory and characterization of Terra from the "Judas Contract" animated movie, as well as from the episodes of the original Teen Titans animated show.

Tara Markov could feel the pit of resentment in her chest pulsing with unresolved frustration; while she fully expected Deathstroke to have her best interests at heart, she still found herself vexed at the reality that the man had enrolled her into the academy and left her there with little explanation. 

The students were for the most part easily ignorable; though some of their superpowers and villainous tendencies made her wonder if some of the kids might prove useful to her mentor’s cause, Tara deemed the lot of them a lost cause. 

Having powers herself, it hadn’t been long before one of the many competing groups of students claimed her as one of their own; she had been swift to ensure that her ‘clique’ had consisted of some of the more exploitable-abilitied children, as she felt it beneficial to her continued safety. 

A few weeks into her schooling, Deathstroke ‘hired’ her team, under the alias of ‘Slade’. 

Something about wanting to make a point, to the local group of teenaged superheroes in the area. 

Her team had run afoul of the team on more than a rare occasion; the Titans were led by a supposed estranged apprentice of the Batman himself, and the team boasted a “Tameranien warrior princess”, a green shapeshifter that had a menagerie of animal skins to choose from, a young man made almost entirely out of metal that matched her own groups tech-geek part for part, as well as cloaked mage with an uncanny aura and a stark personality. 

The group was fond of trading banter and often seemed quite personable, the mystical Titan notwithstanding. Her team leader seemed to be the only one capable or willing to draw out the cloaked Titan’s social side; feeling no which way on the matter herself, Terra left the girl to it and usually took to decimating the green changeling as best as she was able.  

As a whole, the Titans weren’t as tactically oriented as Terra’s group was, but their abilities and dedication to their cause seemed to push the Titans out on top in almost every scuffle they took part in.

Terra asked once, before they were hired to actually dispose of the Titans, why they simply didn’t knock them out and shoot them or else why she couldn’t just bury them alive and be done with it; her teammates muttered begrudgingly about school policies and economical contingency plans.   

Now that they were officially under contract, the rules were on their side and Terra was more than ready to write in a final solution on the roster; a fact that didn’t seem to sit well with most of the kids in her group.  

Tara tried not to hold it against her group though; she recalled from past experience that the first termination was always one of the more emotional encounters to stomach. 

During the planning stage, Tara has assumed ‘Slade’ would fill her in about his game plan, but the man had remained frustratingly distant and unresponsive past instructing her to comply with the mission. 

This led to her team ultimately deciding that their task of ‘removing’ the Titans should be taken into a literal context; while Tara felt ‘termination’ would have been more practical, her leader insisted that the wording of the contract should be adhered to strictly, for everyone’s benefit. 

Their plan was to use her as a mole; gaining entrance to the Titan’s by projecting herself into them as a new recruit, wary of a life of hardship and crime. Then, once she’d been accepted as one of them, she’d relay the team’s strengths and weakness back to her group, where they would compile their ultimate plan of attack. 

Initial contact was easy enough; convincing the team to take her in, had been harder. 

The cloaked girl had distrusted her from the start, which Terra took offense to as a point of pride. 

She remained at odds with the girl as over the course of several weeks, she learned the girl was greatly catered to, and had an amazingly short temper. 

The rest of the team was… nice. 

Too nice. 

Their genuine concerns were nauseating. 

Beastboy’s crush proved to be more aggravating than Billy’s, and the alien princess was downright suffocating with her ‘boundless optimism’ and exuberance; though, Terra was willing to admit secretly, that there was something almost to be respected about the warrior’s unbreakable spirit.  

After a while, she almost came to care for the teens, and their stupid, misguided attempts, at getting her to open up and let go.

 

In the way that she was used to life happening, it was at that point in which her camaraderie with the group was forced to come to an end. 

She’d given the Hive everything they needed to take the Titans down.  

Thus, with the information she’d supplied, Tara’s teammates managed to oust the Teen Titans from their seat of power through a series of small and precordinated battles; after luring the Titans out into the city, her team focused on stealing the Titan’s island headquarters out from under them as a final demoralizing blow, leaving the heroes weak and scattered in the city, where Terra revealed her true colors by collapsing the road and dropping her ‘friends’ into the freshly ripped ravine below. 

She made her way back to the tower in time to see her Hive teammates taking stock of the Tower. 

While Titan’s Tower itself had been neat enough to infiltrate and rifle through, Terra felt that her teammates had gotten more out of it than she had, as she had little in way of emotional investment towards any of it. 

She’d already been living in the building for some weeks, after all. 

She supposed it had been fun enough, to watch her group begin the process of redecorating the place, and pick out their trophies. 

She elected to take nothing, herself; forgoing all of the ex-resident’s belongings, explaining to her team that she already had specific belongings stowed away in her assigned room. -Her laptop, her earpiece, her survival gear; the important stuff she’d brought with her. 

Her team appreciated her generosity, and divvied up the rest of the tower’s items between themselves. 

Jinx, unsurprisingly, took most of the leader’s things, and claimed the dead mage’s belongings for her own, while Gizmo took the bulk of Cyborg’s stuff. Mammoth busied himself with the tower’s food supplies, which Terra felt was perhaps the most reasonable thing to do, while Billy took over the TV and Seemore set about alphabetizing the Titan’s movie collection.     

Several hours later, just as Terra and the others had finally settled into the Tower comfortably, the heroes came back for another round of heated exchange.

Terra and the others had fully expected a revenge strike, and so were fully ready when the Titans came knocking, fists swinging and eyes ablaze. 

What they hadn’t expected, was to see the hero’s team being one member short. 

The cloaked mage, by Robin’s heated admission, had been taken out while the group was lost in the city. 

The air of the battle changed drastically; her own team’s leader seemed hit the hardest by the news; Tara assumed Jinx was envious of the stolen glory, or else was worried about their impending mission status. 

The Titan’s attacks were far more vicious than Terra ever remembered; and as her betrayal was still a very fresh wound, Tara found herself at the brunt of the team’s focus as they fought not only for their lost home, but the loss of their witch as well. 

It took most of her concentration to get herself, and her Hive teammates out of the tower, and into the safety of the underground tunnels beneath the city, where her team took a collective moment to react to everything that’d just occurred.  

 

Her team seemed equal parts confused and upset over the news of Raven’s death, as well as being understandably upset by their loss of hold on the Titan’s base of operations. 

Terra didn’t know how she felt about the news herself; she rather felt that living with the Titans had robbed her of any sense of illusions or projections her teammates held for the group. 

Part of her even felt something like a smug sense of retribution, that Raven had been snubbed out, as she remembered the girl and everyone around her always acting as though she was on some kind of pedestal; as if she were somehow incapable of getting downed in any concrete way.   

Her teammates took turns consoling each other for a moment, before collectively agreeing that waiting to return to the hive would only prolong their impending lecture, and that avoiding punishment would only make things worse for themselves. 

Unfortunately, as they made it back to the Hive, they were correct to learn that their overall mission had been deemed a failure by the schoolboard. 

 

Her team was understandably irate, and desperate for answers. 

 

Secretly, after the scathing lectures and rounds of menial labor forced upon them as punishment, Tara managed to pry some answers out of ‘Slade’; the most he chose to reveal, was that it had been one of his own trained assassins who’d claimed the life of the mystical Titan while the group had been scattered. 

His daughter, of all things. 

Tara hadn’t known the man had any children; the thought was… unpleasant to contemplate. 

She put it out of her mind. 

Slade dropped communication again, shortly thereafter.

It was a month past the last point of contact with still no word from the man, before Tara admitted to herself that she’d been stranded.  

She focused instead on her schoolwork, and reconnecting with her team. 

It was almost strange, how little difference switching between the teams and back again seemed. 

She supposed Mammoth was more or less her favorite of the bunch; large as he was, he served quite well as an intimidation component, and as quiet and mild natured as he was, the boy was easy enough to spend time without putting forth any actual personal investment. 

Terra could spend hours with the boy, just whittling away the hours focusing on trivial things outside themselves, which usually consisted of one form of game or another to keep their brains from thinking too much about anything in particular.  

The other boys were alright, she assented. 

They were a bit more unruly, a little less quiet. 

Their antics usually made it easier to get wrapped up in the moment, which she was ultimately grateful for. It was only when the frustrations of dealing with their collective lack of common senses became too much to bear, that she really had any sort of issue with any of them. 

She also found Billy Numerous’ crush to be both jarring and uncomfortable; she didn’t know why she found herself reflexively repulsed by his attempts at genuine affection, freely given, but her initial thought was to blame it on her supposed relational status with Wilson.

It wasn’t Billy’s fault that he didn’t know she wasn’t on the menu, after all. Of course, undercover as she was, and, left at the school for advanced combat and socialization training as she assumed she was, she wondered if practicing on the available students was expected of her.  

Unable to decide one way or the other, she kept the boy in a rather precarious state, seeped in mixed messages, to keep him hanging onto her conflicting signals with every jerk of his metaphorical chain she pulled.

From what she’d seen of the other couples at the Hive, her tendencies seemed to be par for the course; or at the very least, no one made any mention to her about it. 

In hanging out with the boys however, she also had to spend time with their leader, if only by association.  

Admittedly, she was wary of the girl.

Jinx was a walking pendulum of bad luck, and Tara didn’t feel the need to put herself in any proximity of being on the receiving end; and, after the death of her favorite rival, the girl seemed more at odds with everything in her general surroundings. 

The boys, more often than not, bore the brunt of her directionless venting; the teachers seemed sympathetic to her though, oddly enough. Apparently, Terra guessed, losing an arch nemesis was considered a valid excuse to act something of a bitch. 

While she often snapped at the group as a whole to shape up, a sentiment Tara at least theoretically agreed with, the girl’s abstract ire never seemed to get personal. 

She supposed it was something of a shame, that she never reached out to her leader, as the girl seemed genuinely fond of her, and was always quick enough to lend aid or advice. 

Tara just didn’t like the way the girl seemed to know too much, or the way it felt like the girl could see right through her. 

Jinx’s ability to get her way with the schoolboard was perhaps the only reason Terra kept the relationship between them as amiable as she did, truthfully speaking. 

The academy's teachers were laughable at best, and their Headmistress was well-meaningly naive; the lot of them all were overtly stubborn however, and it was by Jinx’s unwavering insistence that their group got anything done at all, or had as many perks and privileges as they experienced. 

Terra had no idea what Jinx had done, to get that kinda sway, and she was sure she didn’t want to, providing the special treatment continued as it was.  

 

As the months went by, Terra wasn’t certain if it was her team, or herself, but the general dynamics of her friends and their interactions began to change. 

The Titans added new members to their roster, superkids from Metropolis and more alien girls from outer planets and so forth; Terra didn’t much care, but her friends never seemed as satisfied with the battles like they used to. 

Too many variables had changed; too much seriousness had been thrust into everyone too fast, and too young, she guessed. 

While Jinx never talked about the dead girl directly, or indirectly mentioned her at all; Terra could tell well enough, that Jinx was still pissed about whatever spark was no longer there. 

In what she could only guess was something of an abstract point of solidarity, it was such notings and thoughts that ultimately prompted her to partake of Billy’s bed. 

Her actions sickened her, in the morning after; the faint words ‘live fast die young’, echoed ad nasium, from some unknown origin in her head. 

The boys, Billy aside, accepted her casual estrangement from them without fuss; likely used to the ever-shifting tides of alliances in their school.  

She started to withdraw into herself, and blamed it on the residual disgust she had with her memories. 

She wasn’t sure how long she spent on her own, milling about the school in a prolonged fuge state of semi-productive dissociation. 

Eventually, as the classes began to drag on through the semester, Terra felt herself drifting closer to the teachers; some sort of reaction to fill the hole where her mentor had left, she guessed. 

A few of the instructors she’d found, seemed genuinely impressed by her abilities; though she didn’t believe them a lick, part of her felt inescapably drawn to their praises and encouraging words. 

Jinx, to Terra’s annoyment, adamantly began checking up on her, refusing to let the strands of connection between them break in order to dole out hinting concerns and thinly veiled excuses for her behavior. 

Petulant as it was, Tara found Jinx’s well-meaning intentions more than a little patronising and belittling; she wanted to tell the girl off for good, but something in Jinx’s knowing smile made her think better of it, much as she hated to admit it to herself.  

Somewhere between the lines of Jinx’s cautioning warnings, Tara started paying closer attention to the administration of the academy. 

She, like most students, had thought the red cloaked figures strange, when she’d first arrived. 

But, having had taken cue from the other kids, she’d payed them little mind. 

Now, observing them as she was, she noticed they seemed equally keen on observing  _ her; _ on  _ all  _ the children in the school. 

She asked Jinx about it, only to be ushered out into the city’s bustling streets, blanketed by fog while sounds of  super-swarms of cicadas echoing through the city like a bellowing disaster siren; Jinx explained away the choice, as that they were less likely to be overheard for all the noise, and that the robbed figures were not as benign as they seemed.  

“The Hive is two things: one part standing child army, and one part secret cult,” the girl listed, shrugging; “The red cloaks, and the students, ultimately belong to Brother Blood.”

“And what does he want?”   

“You’ll find out soon enough,” Jinx answered, “If you keep grabbing their attention.” 

Tara had tried to ignore the feeling of uncanny coldness that had stayed seeped inside her body  that afternoon; Jinx’s words echoed fruitlessly in her mind the more she tried to forget them. 

She decided to cut her loses, and went back to ignoring the staff and the ‘red cloaks’ entirely. 

 

Slade, apparently, held different ideas. 

 

She caught sight of him one night, speaking in hushed tones with a decorated red cloak, in a sliver of a doorway not fully sealed as she happened to be poking around for secret exits. 

As if sensing her, he turned. 

For a moment, Tara was certain he’d seen her, and then, he was gone. 

She waited until the cloaked figure’s attention was turned before attempting to sneak in. 

She didn’t make it far into the room, before she was grabbed from behind. 

She had been about to fight her way out of her assailant's grasp, before the realization that it was her mentor who held her, took over.

Before she could gather herself enough to protest, Slade hoisted her up by the back of her collar, as if she were no more than a stray cat, and held her out to the robed figure. 

“I’ve already given you the replacement,” Deathstroke murmured, his tone as insidious and quite as ever. 

“You had better hope she’ll be a successful conductor,” the figure growled; “Had you listened to our instructions, we wouldn't've have this little setback in the first place.”

“The girl was too headstrong, she never would have worked,” Slade insisted, “Trust me, this is better for us both in the long run.”

“Wilson,” Tara interjected, while attempting to free herself, “What’s going on? Don’t I get a say-”

“And the payment?” he asked, his tone flat, and his words overshadowing Tara’s. 

“I’ll have my associates bring it to you,” the robbed figure replied; “-But I warn you, if this doesn’t go as planned, we  _ will  _ require another for you to sacrifice.”

“Slade-” Tara cried, as the robbed figure grabbed her. 

“It’s just business, pet,” Deathstroke explained evenly, immobile a few feet across from the scuffle; “Nothing personal.”

 

Tara screamed, rage and fear coursing equally through her, before a swift blow to the back of her head made her world grow black. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Tara groaned, and tried to ignore the pulsing of her brain pounding against the skin-chilling floor.

She slowly blinked away the glare of the dimly flickering fluorescent bulb embedded into the ceiling above her, heaved in a steadying breath, and sat up. 

“Where the fuck,” she murmured in exasperation, her senses slowly righting themselves. 

“Underground,” a familiar voice mused.

Tara picked herself off the floor and swung around to see small figure leaning against on of the nearby walls. 

“Hey Dirtball,” Jinx greated cheerfully.

“What’s going on?” Tara demanded, her patience long since burnt out as rose to her feet.

“Well, currently, you’re standing in one of the many holding cells under the school,” Jinx answered cleanly. 

“Don’t play with me Jinx, I’m not in the mood,” she warned; “Tell me what’s going on.” 

Jinx shifted on her feet and crossed her arms. 

“The red cloaks were going to use one of the Titans for their ritual, but your dickish ex-boyfriend and his stab-happy daughter killed her. -You might remember her. Raven? The girl in the hood? Yeah, to keep from getting gutted for all eternity for offing her, he apparently swapped you for the dead girl so’s he wouldn’t have to give up his daughter Rose,” Jinx explained. 

“So what’s that mean for me?” Terra asked, “Are they gonna’ sacrifice me or something?” 

“Of course not,” Jinx dismissed, waving a hand absently.

Tara relaxed, exhaling a breath. 

“They just want you to enter an old god into existence on this mortal realm,” Jinx continued. 

Terra paused, and tried to process the words the girl had just spoken. 

“I’m not… magic though?” Tara ventured tentatively; she wasn’t sure how to process Jinx’s statement as a whole. 

Jinx shrugged.

“What about you?” 

“They would’ve had me do it,” Jinx admitted, “And I would’ve done it; but my bad luck kinda put a damper on that idea. So it’s up to you instead.” 

Terra waited a moment and bit her lip; the implication that Jinx was somehow involved with the cult should have been reassuring, but all Tara could feel was unsettled and distrustful. 

“So you’re busting me out of here, right?” 

Jinx shook her head. 

“You don’t want that, trust me,” Jinx warned. 

“I’ll decide for myself what I trust, or won’t,” Terra sneered; “If you aren’t going to help me, you can fuck off.” 

Jinx sighed and walked over to the cell door. She turned to look at her a final time, before blasting one of her signature hexbolts into the lock. 

It creaked, and fizzled into pink sparks. 

The door creaked open a few centimeters, and Jinx gestured for Terra to step through. 

As Terra passed her, Jinx placed a hand on her shoulder. 

“Be careful in this place,” Jinx warned; “You don’t know what kinds of things go on here.” 

Terra suppressed a shiver, and forced her way out of the door; she stepped into a hallway that was just narrow enough to be unpleasant, and barley illuminated enough for her to figure out where she wanted to go. 

Not wanting to toy with asinine things like hallways and floor levels, Tara disregarded the idea of picking any direction but ‘up’. 

Using her earth manipulating capabilities, she carved a platform to stand on, and began shifting the area directly above her, to create her own personal transit lift. 

The floor she burrowed into, was strangely darker, and more narrow than the floor she left. 

She passed it off and kept going. 

Every floor she broke into looked nearly identical, and through no point, could Tara feel she was getting any closer to reaching the school or sense the surface above. 

In fact, the more Tara focused through the floors, the more it felt as if she were descending through the layers of earth; not climbing any amount at all. 

Though seemingly impossible, Tara wondered if it were a magical sort of enchantment placed to keep her from escaping; it was the only thing she could think of to rationalize what she was experiencing. 

Feeling tired from her failed escape attempt, Terra stopped trying to tunnel herself to freedom, and decided to try one of the hallways instead. 

_Someone’s gotta’ have stairs somewhere,_ she mused. 

She walked the length of the hallway for some time, silently trying to work out why her mentor would betray her, and why she’d stayed in the school to begin with. 

Inner thoughts aside, Tara tried to keep calm. 

After awhile, she noticed the walls gradually start to change. 

Their color reddened slightly, as if with rust or perhaps with some kind of lichen like fungi; she didn’t stop long enough to inspect anything closely. She felt disgusted enough just glancing at it in passing. 

Amazingly, the end of the decrepit hallway emptied into a small, circular iron stairwell; it creaked and swayed slightly as she stepped into it. 

She was thankful for her gloves, as she gripped the handrail; the wrought iron was also covered in rust and what she could only saume was years of neglect and water damage. 

There was no opening on the landing above. 

Sighing, Tara admitted temporary defeat, and chose to descend; she wouldn’t put it past the cult from turning their underground lair into a maze of dead ends and booby traps, what with their habit of getting raided by super heros every few months. 

The moment her foot stepped onto the dusty, strangely-weathered floor, Tara felt as though she had made a grave mistake.            

It was as if her body recoiled, internally compressing in on itself to keep her from moving forward even a fraction of an inch more; her lungs seemed hesitant even to breath the surrounding air. 

She pushed forward, and brushed the feeling off. 

The hallway walls looked worse than the one she’d left; she was taking in the finer changes of decay when she heard something lumbering towards her back. 

She paused to listen, taking in the way the sounds scraped and thumped in rhythmic patterns; footsteps, closing a gap behind her.

Her instinct, was to run. 

She dashed forward with practiced speed; her lungs pumped air in and out of her flaring nostrils as she concentrated on putting as much space between herself, and whatever had been walking towards her. 

When her legs gave out, she hunched over, leaned her weight against the hallway wall, and tried to still her rapidly beating heart. 

The wall gave way.

The surprise of the wall suddenly crumbling beneath and onto of her crumpled her to the floor, where she spent a few minutes coughing and prying pieces of rubble off of herself.

When the dust cleared, and her watery eyes started to focus again, she made out strange shapes inside the visible spaces of the broken walls.

Twisted, humanoid, shapes.

She didn’t have time to fully react to the distorted figures however, as a shadow cast over her, blocking out most of the hallway’s dim light.

Tara turned to see what had been making the thudding, scraping sounds, and it wasn’t definably pleasant by any definition.

It was, Tara could only describe, as a monstrous beast, more disfigured than even the shapes inside the walls; massive and curved upon itself, it looked as if gravity was doing everything it could to pull the creature through its own body to magnetically flatten it against the floor.

The limbs jutting from the creature’s torso spiraled into grotesque, lightly pulsing hooks that spurted out from the splintered flesh, as if metal had been improperly fused to bone.

She scrambled to dodge the creature’s oncoming blow, rolling further into the gap in the broken wall; on hands and knees she rushed to crawl through the fleshy, wet bodies, and out of the monster’s reach.

Maneuvering through the flesh was awkwardly disgusting; she kept her eyes shut, to keep the blood and other fluids getting into her eyes, and so blindly pushed herself between lumps and limbs, and clumpy strands of what she hoped was only gore covered patches of hair.

Just as her body started to physically reject the sensory overload, the bodies ended, and Tara tumbled into a room.

A disused, and dusty, _dark_ room.   

A classroom.

She wiped the bloodied slime and viscera off of her face as best as her gloves could allow, and took stock of her surroundings.

A single, dimly blue light, hanging above a corner of the room’s frontward facing chalkboard, flickered serenely.

Almost _invitingly_.

Terra stumbled towards it, eager to get any sort of relief from the gloom and to process everything she’d just witnessed.

She shivered, her stylish coat doing little to keep out the haunting atmosphere, and the blood-soaked material doing little to retain any of her body heat.

Standing underneath the light proved to do little to ease her troubled mind; barren as the room seemed to be, Terra felt little need to risk staying in it for any length of time.

Wanting to put as much space between her and the shrieking monster on the other side of the wall as she could, she took note of the classroom’s door, and exited it promptly.

The hallway seemed eerily similar to the ones she’d walked every day since her enrollment; Tara wondered if it meant she was closer to getting out than she first thought.

There were rotting posters and curling flyers taped to the aged bulletin boards, as if the section of school she was in, was from a far older time than the levels she was used to.

It was unnerving, how utterly quiet it was.

Her footsteps didn’t echo, but the sounds of her feet stirring up the layers of dust and forgotten papers littering the floor sounded clumsy to her ears for the lack of any ambient sound around her.

She checked every door she passed; she wasn’t sure why.

Something from her past training reflexively ushered her to be thorough, she supposed.

Each classroom was exactly the same; every room as bare and monotonous as the last.

Through her exploration she learned there were other halls connected to the one she was in, and the floor mirrored every other floor she’d seen in the Hive.

She kept hoping to find some sign of recent activity; a lone janitor perhaps, a lunchbox left briefly on a desk for someone to retrieve it after a bell.

Physically, she dreaded the idea of meeting someone wandering the forgotten rooms; she tried not to look down at herself, or the streaks of browning-red congealing along her arms.  

She looked in vain for some sort of map, or discarded set of notes that might shed light on how to get out of the nightmarish place she was in, but found she was to have no such luck.

Thinking back to the Hive she’d lived in, she tried to navigate the halls by her memory of what the newer building had been set up as; eventually, her turns and pointed wanderings led her to where the cafeteria ought to have been, where instead, a theatre room seemed erected.

Curious, she stepped inside.

The room was brighter than the halls, though only around the stage.

Thin, barely visible floor lights guided her through the rows of seats, until she came close enough to the stage to make out objects left blankly on its surface.

She climbed on the stage to get a closer look; everything was covered by sheets, so when a robbed person moved, her first thought was that a statue or a mannequin had suddenly spurted to life.

She stumbled back and shrieked, before the figure gestured to calm herself.

“Easy, child,” the figure soothed.

“Who are you?” Terra asked, her hands raised to defend herself.

“I am Brother Blood,” he replied warmly; Tara detected a hint of self-righteousness in his tone that reminded her of one too many pompous teachers in the school above. -She wasn’t sure how relieved or irritated about either of those things, that she was.

“And you, dear child, are the source,” he began; “There’s no need to be afraid. This is a most happy occasion,” he insisted; “Here, let’s get you cleaned up.”

“Stay away from me,” Terra warned, letting the glow of her powers flare into her eyes and fingertips.

“I assure you,” the man continued serenely, “that you’ll be well taken care of, -pampered, even, and surely, that must sound nice to you; a far better fate than whatever your old master had in store for you.”

Tara fumed, biting back her reflexive rage at the mention of the man who betrayed her.

“I don’t want any part of whatever you’re planning,” she insisted; “Please just let me get back to class. -I have a history test I need to study for.”

The man tsked and tutted, as if amused by her plea.

“There’s little need for that now,” he said vaguely; “Trigon’s will must be fulfilled, Child. And you have the honor of making that happen.”

“-Come, my acolytes,” he commanded.

From behind the blanketed objects, other robbed figures stepped forth; they unsettled Tara greatly, but they stayed several feet away from her and Brother Blood.

“Mother Mayhem will show you to your quarters,” he instructed, and from behind him, a robbed figure crept closer.

“I want my old quarters,” Tara insisted once more, stepping back.

“It’s too late Child,” Mother Mayhem chided, “The blessing of Trigon is already upon you. There is nothing left for you up there,” the woman insisted; “Come.”

Tara receded another few steps; her back pressed against one of the blanketed objects of indiscernible nature.  

“You can come with us, or you can take your chances with the beasts,” the woman insisted sternly, stepping closer.

Thinking fast, Terra grabbed the blanket from behind her and whisked it off its charge, to throw it over the woman’s face; before the woman could even let out a startled cry, Terra was off as fast as her legs could carry her to the glowing exit sign shining in the darkness past the edge of the stage.

She didn’t get more than a few steps towards it, before more robbed figures sprung up to block her path.

Encircled as she was, she started to feel trapped.

The robbed figured flickered, as if reality was overlapping on itself with something else; Terra started to step back before remembering that there were others still ready to ensnare her from behind.

The robbed figures started to speak as one, but Terra’s eyes blurred, and the harsh sounding language assaulting her ears bubbled into something else entirely, as a brief flash of memory sparked in its stead.

Reflexively, she fought against the memory; attempting to bury the vicious cries that had been shrieked and at hurled at her in her youth.  

She was there, again.

She watched her child-body be drug through the dirt and hoisted up by the rope; the clearing was silent, though Terra could see the mouths and gnashing teeth of the townsfolk accusing her.

Sentencing her.

She tried to close her eyes, unwilling to watch the horrible moment play out.

Fear began to cinch itself around the base of her neck; her hands flew to her hair and her nails dug into her scalp.

Shivering, eyes watered, Tara felt rage wash over her fear.

She refused to fall to her knees.

Her eyes snapped open, and with the lifting of her hands, she brought the whole of the surrounding earth by her sides with her.

The clearing was torn apart; the people and her old self fell as the crumbling world around them broke into tiny pieces.

Past the pieces, reality was waiting.

Terra hurled the earth at the robbed figures, and smoothed out solid swaths of land to encase the cultists with little regard to the brutality of her efficiency.

She was almost gleeful; a strange sort of giddy that shimmered red and fulfilling within her chest.

The intensity of the desire, to _control_ more, to _break_ more, was startling.

The feeling suddenly vanished, and Terra noted that the apparent giddiness had felt far closer to hunger, than anything she’d just thought it as.

She bit her lip.

She crept off the stage; she tried to ignore the mumblings and cut off shrieks from the cultists trapped under layers of forged stone, recalling the bodies in the walls and the likely involvement of the robbed figures having with them.  

Unhindered, Terra made her way to the exit sign.

She didn’t look back.

She _pointedly_ , didn’t look back.

 

The light pouring out from behind the door temporarily blinded her as she opened it.

Squinting, she blinked away her eye adjustments to find herself looking at the streets of the city.

Jump City, in broad daylight, pleasantly minding its own business, as if it had been casually waiting for her to find it.

Terra closed the door behind her forcefully, and walked onto the main sidewalk.

Internally, she prepared herself with explanatory response and dismissive lies, fully expecting to run into several people on the street that would no doubt be curious to see a young woman doused with a liquid murder scene.

The city seemed to be quieter than usual, Terra quickly noted.

It was practically devoid of people from what she could tell; if she hadn’t have known better, she’d have said the street was completely deserted.

She decided to make use of the opportunity and ducked into a retail store to find a change of clothes and picked up a handheld basket to put them in.

She made her choices quickly; she didn’t care about style so much as functionality, though she did choose her choice between the general swaths of colors organised on the various racks.   

Pants, two shirts, and jacket in stow, Terra made her way to the store’s bathroom with the intention of washing as much of the blood off of herself as she could, before changing into the soon to be stolen goods.  

Finding the bathroom to be empty as well, Tara barricaded the door with the trashcan and stripped.

The paper towel was scratchy, and the public scented soap was cold; the wetness of the soap stirred up smears along her arms, forming little circular patterns as she ineffectively swirled the blood around.   

After several passes, she freed most of her arm and shoulder from the darkened fluids and turned her attention to the mirrors above the sinks to work away at her face and neck.

She spent several minutes slowly wiping those off too, before growing idley weary.

She hunched over, and rested her arms against the lip of the sink; she flipped her hair over her head so it rested in the basin, and turned the hot water on.

Minutes floated by, as she stood there, silently waiting for the water in the sink to run clear; the tiny stream of rushing water seemed nearly thunderous, as it washed over her scalp.  

She felt like she should have been angry, or sad.

She didn’t feel much of anything at all.

She settled for labeling her mood as ‘disillusioned’, and lifted her head.

She smirked at her reflection.

The girl in the glass looked hargared and downtrodden; her eyes were sharp though, which she felt was a good sign.

Terra wrung out her back-to-blonde hair and grabbed some more paper towels.

She looked down at her chest to gauge how much soap she would need at set to work; her breasts came clean enough, but something strange forced her brows to knit as she tried to do the same to her stomach.

Patches of red that seemed to apply themselves, before quickly fading again with the next swipe of soaped paper; Terra passed them off as a trick of the light before recalling the words relayed to her through her ordeal.

She scrubbed harder, figuring now, that there must have been some magic mark placed on her skin that needed ridding of.

A few more stretches of paper later, and the marks were gone; the rest of her body was short work, though her back took some finessing with the spare shirt she’d grabbed to make any sort of headway on it.

She was thankful, when she was finally re-dressed.

She felt like a real human again.

Tara sighed easy and pushed the trashcan aside; she fully expected to see an employee of some kind, after how long she’d spent sequestered away, but was instead met with more silence, as the store immediately proved to be empty, still.   

She exited the store without much ado; not wanting to confront any more persons then she’d inevitably have to.

The street was still as barren as it was when she found the store.

The sun was hanging lower; in the late of the afternoon, fog was starting to creep in from the bay. It curled proactively under awnings and over the lowest patches of sidewalk and asphalt.

The overall quietness, from the lack of usual pedestrians or traffic flow was unnerving.

Tara wondered if there was some sort of villain battle in the area that she’d missed; usually, she thought, the crowds would flock to whatever vantage point they could procure whenever the Titans popped up, but she supposed a large enough problem like a bomb or a fire could scare off the masses.  

She decided the smartest thing she could do, then, was to vacate the area herself; no doubt some streets over she’d find a concerned citizen who’d impart the daily news to her, so that she could better avoid the threat herself.

She set off at a brisk walk; the feeling of being an easy target, alone, and out in the open as she was did not rest easy within her.

The next street she walked into was also empty.

_Bomb threat,_ she affirmed.

She kept walking.

She crossed over three such empty streets; her nerves increasingly began to flare, around her feets pebbles and tiny bits of gravel shot upwards to chest height, before plummeting back to Earth as she continued moving.

Not knowing from which direction the radius of trouble was taking, Terra cut a corner and headed towards the grand boardwalk, figuring she could get a good look at the city, or find some of the missing people.

The fog was thick, over the area.

It hung over the ocean like a deceivingly impenetrable wall; she wondered if perhaps the ‘bomb threat’ was actually some sort of storm warning evacuation.

The waters didn’t sound rough, however; all she could hear was the creaking and groaning of the old wooden structure settling beneath her feet.

She walked to the edge of the boardwalk to confirm her assumptions; she climbed onto the railing rungs and hoisted herself over the bar, to lean far enough over that she could see through the fog, to the waters gently wavering a few feet below.

The water was calm, though something about its color seemed off.

The air also smelled strange; the density of salt in the air seemed to be overpowered by something.

_Blood?_

_I’ve probably just got chunks stuck up my nose from earlier or something_ , Tara assumed.

Still, she was uneasy.

Using her powers, she called up a tiny bowl of sealed sand to get a better look at the state of the sea.

Cupped almost perfectly above her hands, the bowl hovered motionless midair.

The sea was unmistakably blood.

The shock broke her concentration; immediately her powers flicked out and the sand bowl fell, splattering the blooded water across the planks.

As if in retaliation, a lone siren rang out through the dense fog and clattered amongst the buildings of the city.

Terra looked up, and tried to make out what she could through the fog now drowning over the area as a whole.

A series of lights bounced around a portion of the clouds next to a particular set of buildings.

Though she couldn't be certain, Terra felt the anomaly was the key to finding out the context for what was going on in the city.   

She broke into a run and stopped when she hit asphalt; with solid ground under again, she lifted herself up on a small platform of disjointed earth, and propelled herself upon it above the streets at high speed.

The fog forced her to slow down to keep from missing jutting street lamps and roof slopes.

She mumbled a few curses under her breath but stopped when a different sound reached her ears.

Beneath her, a few feet ahead, was a figure shuffling through the low lying clouds.  

Terra dropped herself to the actual ground and sped up to the person, civil conversation hanging on the tip of her tongue.

As she got closer however, her pace slowed.

The person was foremostly, walking backwards.

The person, more importantly, was herself.

She was distorted; an imperfect copy.

Blank, in her face; which was alarming and almost painful to look at, and Terra noticed, her clothes were undeniably her own.

She had too many arms.

Tara didn’t like that.

A half-realized yelp of a syllable sputtered and died in her throat.

The figure, -herself- turned its head around effortlessly, and then disjointedly, the rest of the body followed suit until it was… facing her, again.

The body was still hers; the clothes, a different set, but still her own.

It shuffled towards her, a pair of its arachnid-like arms lifting, like it was prepared to strike.

Terra blindly pushed a wave of solid earth against the creature and bolted.

She took once more to the skies; she wasn’t willing to risk the actual streets any longer.

She ignored the strange sounds emanating from the world beneath her, and focused on the shifting glows still peacefully colliding around the clouds.    

The glows seemed to congregate over the old fairground, next to the heart of the city; Tara recalled the beauty of the city park in the summer sunshine, and tried not to shiver as she slowly let herself descened.

She stepped back onto solid ground, the tall park trees overhanging her on either side.

She looked out to the tiny fair.

Just as eerily empty as the rest of the city she’d seen, the colored, flickering lights rotating in a caricature of joviality was enough to make Tara’s stomach turn.

She crept towards it, slowly.

It wasn’t so bad, when she actually walked inside.

If she steadied her breathing, it almost felt as though the park was merely closed for maintenance; perhaps down for the season, and that she’d taken a decidedly unwarranted tour of her own accord.

The hazy-ness was a little dreary, she supposed.

The balloons looked out of place, and almost ominous, gently swaying in the fog.

Banners, posters, cardboard cutouts; all seemed damp and products left of of their places in time.

A loud, sudden onslaught of music assaulted the grounds; Terra pankicked, and ripple shot through the earth, spiraling out from all directions under her feet.

Thankfully, nothing collapsed; and the music, she quickly noted, was from the carousel that had sprung to life.

It was whittling away in what Terra almost felt was an absentmindedly carefree nature; she walked towards it.

Jinx, was leaning against the conductors booth.

Smiling.

It took almost every ounce of nerve and willpower in her body, to restrain herself from from shooting a ten ton spike of compressed ore through the girl’s chest.

Terra walked up to her.

“I’d say ‘Welcome to Hell!’,” Jinx chimed cheerfully, “But it actually hasn’t arrived yet.”

Terra stared at her; her mouth was dry and she felt almost unable to speak.

“We got the seas of blood and the heralds going though,” Jinx continued conversationally, as if she were unbothered by Terra’s lack of reaction; “I feel bad for the seers. -They’re really going to have a bad headache when they wake up. But at least the birds will be enjoying themselves soon.”

Terra remained silent.

Jinx took a moment to look her over.

“Okay Dirtball, are you ready to actually hear me out this time?”

Feeling as though she were disconnected from her body by all but the tiniest of threads, Terra nodded.    

“Good,” Jinx replied; “Follow me.”

She followed the girl for some time, leaving the fairgrounds entirely.

They passed the park and the prominent pizza place stationed in the fork of the main roads.

Jinx took her to a part of town that Tara had never ventured before.

She’d never had a reason, to visit the cemetery before.

Jinx led her to a grave nestled humbly amongst the others.

It was fresher, than its neighbors.

“It’s hers,” Jinx explained blankly, gesturing at the name.

While the name didn’t ring a bell, the inscription thanking the deceased for her time as a valiant protector of the city, and beloved friend by all sent a familiar sickening sensation up to her mouth.

She frowned.

_Raven._

“What does she have to do with this? She’s already dead,” she muttered.

“Not for long,” Jinx countered, her animalistic grin returning.

Tara looked at her, and tried not to make any sudden movements.

“Here’s the thing, Doll,” Jinx began, “Trigon is coming. There’s no ‘ifs’, ‘ands’, or ‘buts’ about that. And when he comes, he’s going to destroy every part of existence as we know it.”

“So how do we stop that?”

“We don't,” Jinx countered; “ _-She_ does.”

Tara looked to the grave, and back to Jinx, who’d stepped unnervingly closer.

“She’s the only one powerful enough to stop him Terra, bringing her back is our only chance.”

“Ok, so we raise the dead,” Terra agreed, her distaste for the Titan grating her tone; “Say your magic spell or whatever and I’ll get out of your hair.”

“It’s not that simple, unfortunately. Well, not for you at least,” Jinx admitted.

Terra sighed and crossed her arms.

“You have… a blank slate, inside of you,” Jinx offered cautiously.

Tara raised a brow.

“As it currently is, trigon is going to be… born, from that.”

“Wait, what?”

“-Don’t worry, it’s not a baby exactly. It’s just… a flashdrive? Yeah, think of it as an empty flashdrive,” Jinx insisted, “And those cultists loaded the program for Trigon into it.”

“Gross,” Tara murmured, looking down at herself.

“In order to stop Trigon, we need to load Raven’s program onto it instead,” Jinx stated, “The cult is still going to summon him here; they’ve been planning this for too long to give up now, and I’m sure they already have a few back up plans.”

“But won’t the… programming just give us a... ‘Raven’ baby?” she asked cautiously, “How will there be time for her to… do whatever it is she needs to do?”

“It’s not a baby,” Jinx huffed; she sighed and rubbed her temples before inhaling a deep breath before continuing, “You know how Athena popped out of Zeus's skull, all fully formed and stuff? -It’ll be just like that.”

“I... don’t understand,” Terra admitted; her mind whirled awkwardly as it struggled to string everything together in a processable fashion.

“I don’t care if you don’t, honestly speaking,” Jinx chidded, “as long as you help me.”

“So is all this,” Terra began, struggling to encapsulate what she could hardly perceive, “The fog, the ocean, all of that is the apocalypse? What about that… thing in the school basement? What about the people in the city? Why did they look like me?”

Jinx didn’t answer for a moment; she looked at her intently, as if pondering over her Terra’s statement in awe, or something like disbelief. Terra’s heart raced.

“They look like people to you?” she asked quietly.

Tara’s body felt encapsulated by cold.

“What makes Raven so important anyway?” Tara asked forcibly, in effort to shake herself back to normal by focusing on something familiar.

Something she hated.  

“She’s his gateway,” Jinx answered dismissively.

Tara’s eyes opened in disbelief.

“Yeah, that’s why the school was so upset that Ravager killed her,” Jinx furthered, “They were pissed that Slade was tryin’a stop the apocalypse from happening in the first place.”

Tara tried to swallow Jinx’s words down; they lodged uncomfortably in her esophagus.

“Like, to be fair, Trigon was gonna’ use Raven as his portal here,” Jinx warned, “But ‘here’ is where Raven would’ve and will, defeat him.”   

“How do you know all of this?” Tara murmured.

“I’ve been in the Hive a long time;” Jinx shrugged, “And I’ve spent the past few months gettin’ to know Raven and her dad a bit more.”

“Just take it,” Tara spat, surprising the girl.

“Just… take the flash drive or the baby, or the whatever the fuck it is. -I don’t fucking want to be a part of this,” she hissed.

Jinx looked as though she was about to argue, but paused.

She looked as if she were listening to something, with the barest tilt of her head, and fingertips pressed daintily against her lips.

She nodded, once.

“Alright,” Jinx agreed, snapping her attention back to her.

Jinx rolled her shoulders back, as if readying herself for something.

Terra forced herself not to move.

Jinx stopped moving, and smiled.

 

“Okay Dirtball,” Jinx mewled, as she stepped forward with her powers flared; “Take a dirt- _nap_.”

  
  
  
  


 


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

Tara Markov sat at her desk, feeling nothing particular about anything in general.

 

School had already finished for the day; she had a math quiz to study for, but she lacked any sort of motivation to do so.

 

She thought about clicking onto her old accounts.

 

The newsreel on her laptop screen was paused; she’d left it as such, for some time.

 

The image frozen, was of a team of tiny superheroes, haloed under the spanning cloak of the arisen-girl above.

 

Tara supposed she looked good, for someone who’d supposedly been dead.  

 

_“-If I’m going to be part of this team, we have to get along!”_

 

_“You’re not part of this team,” Raven spat, “Not yet. -And if you even endanger my friends again, you never will be.”_

 

The words echoed faintly in her head.

 

She wasn’t a Titan; just a girl with a geometry test that she was procrastinating studying for.

 

A regular girl, at a regular school, learning regular things.  

 

_“Just so you know;” the girl said, her pink hair glistening in the sun, “It worked.”_

 

_“What are you talking about?”_ she’d replied, as the girl was already walking away; _“Who are you?”._

 

_“Just some bad luck,” the girl had called over her shoulder, grinning; “-Later Dirtnap.”_

 

Tara studied the rays of the setting sun streaming into her room from the spaces between her blinds.

 

Thinking of Jinx reminded her about Billy.

 

_“Maybe you don’t remember Terra, but I do!”_

 

_“-Stop calling me that!”_

 

The memory blurred; to a different boy; a different place.

 

_“Why can’t we go back to the thing we were? Back when we were happy?”_

 

_“Things were never the way you remember Beast Boy,”_ she’d said.

 

_I was never happy,_ she thought, to the broken-hearted boys on rival teams.

 

To herself.

 

She picked up her tiny succulent, in its tiny, colorful pot.

 

The girls she’d used to be, were just memories, she thought tonelessly at the tiny plant in her hands.

 

_How reliable are memories, anyway._

 

She sighed, and set the tiny plant back onto her desk.

 

She wouldn’t take up any studying, but there was a vastness of distractions on the internet that called to her.

 

_I don’t even regret it,_ she thought, clicking.

 


End file.
